A Clearer Peek at John Dough and the Cherub

The latest issue of The Baum Bugle, dated winter 2006, includes an article from me analyzing L. Frank Baum's fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, published in 1906. (The Bugle, published three times a year by the International Wizard of Oz Club, is devoted to scholarship about the Oz books and related matters.)

Because of an error at the printer, some images in this Bugle were reproduced poorly. I'm therefore posting links to where I found two of the images that appeared with my article, for anyone who's interested.

The photo on top of page 9 shows the INFANT INCUBATORS building at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. That image and another from Buffalo appear on Dr. Ray Duncan's fine website Neonatology.org, which archives a great deal of material about the medical care of newborns.

At the bottom of page 9 is an illustration by May Wilson Preston from Ellis Parker Butler's "gently satirical novel" [did I write that phrase? I like it] The Incubator Baby. That was published in book form the same year as John Dough and the Cherub but had started to appear in a magazine a couple of years before. Here is a clearer image of spectators peering at the little baby at an exposition. Neonatology.org offers page scans of the entire novel.

I included links to other interesting Neonatology.org items back in this posting about John Dough. My article in the Bugle goes over some of the same ground as my introduction in the Hungry Tiger Press edition of Baum's book (hyped at right), but each version contains material not in the other. The book introduction, for instance, starts with how Baum started to write his story for Ladies' Home Journal editor Edward Bok, and how that relationship affected the story. The article has more to say about John R. Neill's art.

For another John Dough image, Jared Davis offers a comparison between Marcus Mébès's colorization of a Neill image for the cover of the Bugle above and the picture as originally printed in only three colors.